This issue marks the beginning of e-flux journal ’s second year. The open-ended editorial model seems to be working—contributors have frequently chosen to borrow, extend, or elaborate upon concerns opened up by previous texts. So far, discussions on self-design have spoken to an interest in self-building practices, the factory as a museum became the museum as a factory, while a speculative model for granting legitimacy to artistic acts in the absence of exhibition infrastructures...

Many recent works of art hold undoubtedly close ties to anthropology, resembling reverse ethnography or neo-ethnography, taking the form of research that embraces anthropology’s sociological methods, adopting documentary techniques or borrowing from such genres as the travelogue. Anthropology, on the other hand, is currently engaged in renewed debates over the discipline’s roots as reflected in its contemporary “politics.” These controversies, involving politics, ethics (both disciplinary...

Positions June 2009
Making art, as I’ve always put it, is a habit—a poor one in my case. Making art is not initially creation but constant repetition, salvaged by making puny differences in certain orders on the plane of the feasible. Art is, semiotically speaking, purely negative; it cannot be defined positively. And of course doing it entails not doing something else . Like some of my Iranian colleagues, I’m not doing it these days. We have all seen frames that we can freeze, stick...

The Products of Fragility
Modernity, the mother of many democracies, has given a great deal of attention to developing means of preservation and conservation. It has taught us to care for all that is frail and delicate. Charles Baudelaire, speaking about one of his contemporaries, the photographer Miron, said: “He photographed Paris because it is ephemeral.” 1 Perhaps then it should come as no surprise that such an image, itself made up of only smooth paper and some ink, outlasts the...

Irene ist Viele! 1 ] (1971), in which the voiceover says “Irene ist Viele” (Irene is many). In the film, the figure of Irene stands for the many factory workers who are single mothers. Eine Prämie für Irene was one of the first films in Germany to suggest the interrelations between the public and the private spheres. “Irene ist Viele” was also the title of a film program I curated together with art historian Rachel Mader in the Shedhalle Zürich in 1996, in which films by feminist...

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